
Class. 



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"ABRAHAM LINCOLN" 



AN ORATION BY 

THE REV. SAMUEL J. SKEVINGTON 

DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF 

The Lincoln Centennial Celebration 




Y. M. C. A. HALL, NYACK - ON - HUDSON 

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12th, 1909 



"ABRAHAM LINCOLN" 

AN ORATION BY 
THE REV. SAMUEL J. SKEVINGTON 

DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF 

The Lincoln Centennial Celebration 

AT 

Y.M.CA. HALL, NYACK - ON - HUDSON 

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12th, 1909 



Issued by a Few Citizens of Nyack-on-Hudson who 
are Lovers of the Memory of Abraham Lincoln 



JOURNAL OFFICE 
1909 



44££&Ia!££&- 



fW 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



"There was a man sent from God whose name was" 
Abraham Lincoln. 

On the 1 2th day of the second month of the year 1 809, 
the birth year of a peculiarly brilliant galaxy of great lights, 
among whom were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan 
Poe and Alfred Tennyson, stars of the first magnitudes in 
the firmament of poetry; Chopin and Mendelssohn, master 
workmen in the charmed world of music; Charles Darwin, 
the great pioneer of modem science ; William Ewart Glad- 
stone, the Grand Old Man of British statesmanship, and 
Samuel Francis Smith, the humble author of the immortal 
national hymn, "My Country 'Tis of Thee"; just one hun- 
dred years ago to-day was born the noblest and grandest 
of them all, the Great American, the incarnation of the 
spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the embodiment 
of the new Democracy, the preserver of the Union, the 
emancipator of the negro slave, the first of the hallowed 
trinity of America's presidential martyrs. The "Immortals" 
among the sons of men are strangely few, but though no star 
came down to twinkle its prophetic homage over the rude 
log-cabin, and no angel-song floated on the wintry air, and 
none of the wise men in the east so much as dreamed that 
a kingly man was likely to be born in the rugged and un- 



courtly West, the whole world recognizes to-day that he 
who was born of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in the lonely clear- 
ing of the Kentucky forests, was destined by high heaven to 
be enshrined in the topmost circle of the temple of humanity, 
among the sublimest of the sons of men. 

It remains for coming generations to trace the stream 
of heredity through the humble lines of his known ancestry 
to the yet hidden springs of his towering grandeur, but for 
the present he stands before us a man of the soil, a mysteri- 
ous enigma like unto Melchizedek, to be explained by noth- 
ing that we know, either of his blood or his training. He is 
the one great man and mystery and miracle of the Nineteenth 
Century. 

His mother — his "angel-mother," as he called her — to 
whom, like every other man who ever becomes worth while, 
he owed more than to any other human being, was a woman 
of marked gentleness, intelligence and piety. Though she 
succumbed to the rigors and hardships of her pioneer life 
before the boy had spanned his first decade, she had already 
impressed deep upon his sensitive spirit the love of truth and 
justice, the integrity of heart, and the reverence for God and 
things divine, that remained with him, conspicuous charac- 
teristics, to the end of his days. Some years later, when 
his honest and humble father married Sarah Bush Johnson, 
the son of Nancy Hanks was blessed by the helpful sym- 
pathy and ministering love of a second mother. 

His school life was of the scantiest; he was the graduate 
of no scholastic institution, but all his days he was a brilliant 



student in the university of hard work and hard knocks. But 
he loved to read, and what is worth more, and alas! much 
more rare, he loved to think; he thought more than he read, 
and though his books were few, his study of them was so 
thorough that it more than compensated for the scantiness of 
his library resources. He had extraordinary qualities of 
mind. From a boy he could never tolerate the hearing of 
that which he could not understand, and accepted every 
"dark saying" as a challenge to be fought out to a clear un- 
derstanding. Once on the trail of an idea, there was no rest 
of mind until it was not only fairly caught, but completely 
mastered, until, in his own words, he had "bounded it north 
and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it 
west." 

His was that vision of mind that pierced through the ex- 
ternals, the surface matters, and gripped the foundation 
facts and eternal principles, and then his was the power to 
express them in words so simple and phrases so clear that, 
like Him who spake as never man spake, "the common peo- 
ple heard him gladly," and understood. 

He may have lacked some things the schools could have 
given, but Nature had endowed him with the highest order 
of an uncommon commodity that no school could supply — 
the grace of common sense. His was "the wisdom without 
learning" to such a degree that Jeff Davis declared he had 
"more common sense than any man in America," and 
Lowell called him "the incarnation of the common sense of 
the people." 



In moral character he was unmarred, clean and pure, 
and uncontaminated by a single vice. There are no dark 
and dismal passages in his life over which the mantle of 
charity need be thrown to hide any ugly unseemliness. He 
could have said, with Spurgeon, the sainted preacher, "You 
may write my life across the sky. I have nothing to con- 
ceal." Living in a ruggedly honest but roughly uncultured 
civilization, among a people given to much drinking and 
loud swearing, with a strange nazaritism he held himself 
aloof from both, never so much as tasting intoxicating liquor 
and never soiling his lips with profane speech. 

At the age of 19, after a childhood and youth cheerless 
enough, he emerged from the shadows of the Kentucky for- 
ests, as the pilot of his father's prairie schooner, transport- 
ing the family to the new home in Indiana, giving little prom- 
ise of becoming and doing what the oncoming years were to 
unfold of glorious character and heroic deed. 

Soon after having helped his father to comfortably settle 
in the still newer home in Macon County, Illinois, to which 
the Lincolns had emigrated two years after their Indiana 
settlement, Abraham, now having reached the years of man- 
hood, announced his intention of leaving home in quest of 
his own independent fortune. Going to New Salem, he 
made an inauspicious beginning by buying a business on 
notes, failing, and retiring, with nothing for his trouble but 
a little experience and a considerable debt, from which it 
took him some time to extricate himself, but which he paid to 
the last cent. 



Then he turned his hand to land surveying, becoming 
deputy county surveyor, and also held the office of post- 
master, carrying the weekly mail in his hat, and delivering 
it as he chanced to meet those to whom the letters might be 
addressed. In connection with his administration of this un- 
important federal office an incident is chronicled which is 
most significant as an illustration of his scrupulous honesty. 
During his incumbency the post office at New Salem was 
discontinued, and by some oversight the balance of cash on 
hand, which amounted to sixteen or eighteen dollars, was 
not called for. Then having taken up the study of law, he 
removed to Springfield, where he tasted some of the bitterest 
poverty of his life, being compelled again and again to bor- 
row from his friends that he might have the bare necessities 
of life. But when, one fine day, a government official un- 
expectedly called for that long-forgotten post office balance, 
the young law student calmly walked over to his boarding 
house and came back with an old blue sock, in which were 
found the identical silver and copper coins that had been 
paid him for postage, and footing up cent for cent to the 
exact amount of the draft. In the face of penniless poverty 
and the humiliating necessity of borrowing, he had never 
touched the trust funds in his care, even though seemingly 
forgotten by the Government for several years. No wonder 
they called him "Honest Abe." 

In the meantime he was training his mind and studying 
law, and while he never became one of the great lights of 
the legal fraternity, he did become a successful jury lawyer, 



as honest and faithful to truth and justice in his professional 
as he ever was in his private life. 

In 1 834 he was elected to the State Legislature, trudging 
on foot the hundred miles to and from Vandalia, which was 
then the capital of Illinois ; and after having served four terms 
and declining further re-election, in 1 846 he was sent to the 
National Congress. Declining the offer of the Governorship 
of the Territory of Oregon, which would, in all seeming 
probability, have changed the whole current of his life, and 
not impossibly of the whole nation, Lincoln dropped out of 
politics and applied himself to the practise of the law. But 
in 1 854 the slumbering giant was aroused. The time for 
which a far-seeing Providence had planned and prepared 
him was now at hand. The iniquitous Dred Scott decision 
of Judge Taney, the Missouri Compromise, and the "squatter 
sovereignty" policy championed and advocated by Senator 
Douglas, of Lincoln's own State; the excitement attending 
the ever increasing business of the so-called "Underground 
Railway," the imperious demands of the slave-holding South 
for the protection and expansion of what they called the 
"divine institution," the impassioned attacks of the New Eng- 
land abolitionists on what they called the "sum of all vil- 
lainies," and the gathering clouds of the irrepressible con- 
flict that could no longer be doubted or delayed, all this 
formed a condition that needed and called Abraham Lincoln 
to the mission of his life, 

In the greatest intellectual duel on the stage of our polit- 
ical history since Webster and Hayne crossed their Damas- 

8 



cus blades in the U. S. Senate, Lincoln fought Douglas on 
the fundamental issue of human freedom, taking higher and 
bolder ground than had ever yet been assumed by any 
American statesman. 

It was now that he made his immortal utterance, "A 
house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the 
Government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
half free." 

That brave and heroic stand cost him a seat among the 
Senators of his time, but it gave him a throne among the 
immortals of all time. 

Lacking in the personal charms and graces of the orator, 
but with able and impressive speech, of equal beauty and 
simplicity, blood earnestness and force of logic, he stood and 
plead for the life of his country and the liberty of her 
four million swarthy slaves, as Demosthenes plead for 
Athens and Cicero for Rome and Burke for India, and 
while Douglas won the election, the verdict of the nation 
awarded the moral and intellectual victory to Lincoln, and 
the aroused people rallied to his standard, and crowned his 
brow with the proudest laurel that any free man ever wore. 
They recognized him as the man of the hour, as we now 
recognize him as the man of the century and one of the few 
men of the ages, the man "sent from God." 

The American principle was on trial for its life. The 
fate of the great Republic, dedicated from its birth by the 
immortal Declaration of Independence, and the heroic blood 
of the Revolutionary fathers, to the proposition of human 



freedom and self-government, standing for the dignity of 
manhood and the sovereignty of the soul, was trembling in 
the balance. 

In 1 860 the issue of the political campaign was centered 
on what the Continental Congress declared to be a self-evi- 
dent truth, "that all men are created equal; that they are en- 
dowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, 
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
ness." On this rock of eternal truth the might of some men 
and the rights of all men were predestined from all eternity 
to come together with a clash and a crash. Aristocracy and 
Democracy, the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future, 
were preparing to cross swords in a mortal combat, fighting 
for the mastery, not only of this land of the West, but of 
the whole world. It was not only a national, but a human 
crisis. 

In that hour, the people, the people nearest the soil, the 
common people, turned away from the idol of the party, 
W. H. Seward, the ripe scholar, eminent lawyer, wise states- 
man and experienced diplomat, one of the most able and 
distinguished among the Governors of this great Empire 
State, and chose for their leader and standard bearer the 
untried giant of the West, electing Abraham Lincoln as 
the sixteenth President of the United States. 

To many this choice seemed to cast serious doubt on the 
wisdom of popular government, on the ability of the people 
to select and elect their leaders with sagacity and safety. 
Placing in the White House the child of the log-cabin, tra- 

10 



versing the whole social life of the nation and bringing from 
the obscurest obscurity of the bottom to the dazzling glare 
of the top this plain man of the people was surely a bold 
and daring move. But the people had faith in him, as he 
had boundless faith in them, and time and events abundantly 
proved that this time, at least, "Vox Populi" was also 
"Vox Dei," 

But it was no very exhilarating condition of affairs that 
greeted the new President when he quietly entered the cap- 
ital city during the night to escape the murderous plots 
against his life. 

He was hated by the slave-holders of the South because 
he opposed the rights of slavery in new territory, repudiated 
by the Abolitionists of the North because he recognized the 
legal rights of existing slavery under the Constitution, and 
distrusted by the leaders of his own party because he was to 
them too much of an unknown quantity to have won their 
confidence. When, on the fourth of March, 1861, he stood 
forth to take over the reins of government, he found the Con- 
federacy an established fact, with civil and military equip- 
ment, the United States treasury empty, the army scattered 
and impotent, the federal forts and arsenals seized, treason 
stalking defiant and unrebuked in Washington, the South 
determined to secede, and the North paralyzed with doubts 
and fears. 

It was a day of supreme tension, but standing, robed in 
the simplicity and sublimity of his conscious mission, calm 
and fearless amid the frenzy of passion and the dread of 

11 



tragedy, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office, and read 
his first inaugural message, preaching with great force and 
feeling, weighty argument and winsome pleading, the "Gos- 
pel of the Union," appealing to the "better angels" of the 
nation to face the problems calmly and solve the difficulties 
peacefully. 

And as he stands there, in the initial hour of his presi- 
dential career, let us note the appearance of the man. Six 
feet four inches in height, slender, but sinewy and of great 
muscular strength, he was a man of very marked physique; 
but it was his face, "half Roman and half Indian" in its 
cast of features, that stamped itself on the memory as one 
never to be forgotten. A massive head, wide brow, strong 
nose, full lips and most remarkable dark grayish brown eyes, 
deep set, with a far-away look, and an inexpressible sadness 
when in repose, but capable of sparkling mirth when his 
abounding sense of humor wooed them from their melan- 
choly depths, and of such gentleness that they were declared 
to be "the kindest eyes ever placed in human head." It 
was a wonderful face, seamed with care and steeped in sad- 
ness, yea, the saddest face of his race, but a face so full 
of soul that we can easily understand the expression of the 
woman who came from his presence saying, "They told me 
that he was an ugly looking man, but he is the handsomest 
man I ever saw in my life." His handsome heart transfig- 
ured his unhandsome face. 

But he soon had enough to bear on that great sympa- 
thetic heart to seam and shadow a less expressive counte- 

12 



nance than his, for with the firing of the first shot on Fort 
Sumter, on the 1 2th of April, 1 86 1 , the country was 
plunged into all the horrors of the Civil War. Barring his 
few weeks of military service in 1832 at the time of the 
Black Hawk Indian war, the new presidential Commander- 
in-Chief of the Army and Navy was not like Washington, 
Jackson, Harrison and Taylor before him, and Grant, 
Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley and Roosevelt after 
him, a man of war, more or less trained and experienced in 
the arts of armed conflict; he was pre-eminently a man of 
peace, but nevertheless his was the master-spirit and master 
hand throughout the longest, bloodiest and most Titanic 
struggle of our history. 

What Washington did for the founding of the Union, 
Lincoln did for the preservation of the Union. The one 
broke the thirteen colonies away from the tyranny of Eng- 
land, established them in the independence of the "United 
States", and weaved their symbolic red and white stripes into 
one flag; the other set himself against the disruption of that 
Union, and gave mind and heart, love and life to the 
keeping of every star in the blue of that flag. 

The Northern side of the Civil War (in which these ven- 
erable patriots bore their honorable and heroic part) was 
fought in the defense of the unity and integrity of the 
nation. 

Of this conflict Lincoln was the very center, and to it he 
contributed what only a Lincoln could. 

To the cause of the Union he gave the inspiration of an 

13 



unbounded faith in the Tightness of its foundation principle, 
and of an unfaltering hope that even in the darkest of the 
many dark days never despaired that ultimately right would 
prove its might, and that God would give the victory to 
those who fought on the divine side of the question of human 
liberty. 

To the cause of the Union he consecrated his genius of 
leadership, interpreting the issue of the conflict to the intelli- 
gence of the people, appealing for support to the heart of 
the people, and winning for the beloved cause the good will 
of the people. 

In the service of the Union, this champion of freedom, a 
stranger to the love of power for power's sake, with whom 
presidential honors were forgotten in presidential sorrows, 
developed into the greatest and most successful executive and 
ruler this or any other free people ever had. 

In the service of the Union he manifested greater political 
astuteness than Thurlow Weed, greater diplomatic skill and 
judgment than William H. Seward, and greater oratorical 
powers and resources than Edward Everett. 

It was the cause of the Union that inspired his thought 
and clothed his words with their sublimest dignity and beauty 
and power, as in his first inaugural when with such patience 
and pathos he plead with the passionate South, and in his 
second inaugural, the briefest but noblest and loftiest of all 
presidential inaugurals, when his great, burdened soul 
breathed out over the nation, and the world, the sweetly sol- 
emn fervor of his piety, and the mournfully tender pathos of 

14 



his patriotism, and at Gettysburg, on the blood-consecrated 
battlefield, when he rose to an exaltation of utterance un- 
equalled in the history of American eloquence save by Pat- 
rick Henry at Williamsburg and Wendell Phillips at Fan- 
euil Hall, and always it was the cause of the Union that 
inspired, and to the cause of the Union that he offered the 
sublimest effluence of his heart and mind and lip. 

It was to serve and save the Union, not to please the rad- 
ical abolitionist, or gratify his own conviction of the injus- 
tice of negro slavery, that he issued the emancipation procla- 
mation which liberated an enslaved race and broke the back 
of the Rebellion. 

And it was while wrestling with God for the cause of the 
Union that he was led into the richest depths of his religious 
experience. His state papers are full of a noble faith in 
God; indeed, some of them read like passages from the old 
prophets, but when he first became President his religious 
convictions were dull and hazy, and his religious life was 
weak and uncertain, but the burdens of the imperiled and 
suffering Union that well nigh crushed him to the earth, 
drove him again and again to his knees before God with the 
consciousness of the utter insufficiency of human wisdom 
and human power to cope with his problems and carry his 
heart-breaking load. It was not through the tall and stately 
gateway of reasoning, but through the lowly portals of service 
and self-sacrifice, service and self-sacrifice for the cause of 
the Union, that he was led from the low lands of troublous 

15 



doubt to the high lands of triumphant faith and rejoicing 
experience. 

He was the touchstone of the Union, around him a mil- 
lion men fought the bloodiest warfare of the century ; around 
him Union and disunion grappled in a deadly struggle; 
around him four million swarthy slaves dropped their fet- 
ters and arose in the liberty and dignity of their common 
humanity. 

And after four years of hourly martyrdom, he emerged 
at last, the towering giant of the age, triumphantly vindi- 
cated by a re-election at the polls, victoriously vindicated by 
the final success of the conquering Grant and the boys in 
blue, divinely vindicated by the coming of peace and the 
abiding unity and integrity of the Union, and 'round the 
world and up into the very heavens flashed the glad, glorious 
message that the Star Spangled Banner in triumph still 
waved, o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

The war was over. The Rebellion was crushed. The 
Union was saved. The negro was free. The tattered but 
triumphant Stars and Stripes of Old Glory were flying over 
a reunited people; and peace, an honorable and magnani- 
mous peace was spreading its white wings over the battle- 
scarred land, and the many shadowed homes of both the 
blue and the gray. 

And out of it all, towering above the giants of the camp, 
and the giants of the council, was the "man sent from God 
whose name" was Abraham Lincoln. 

"With malice towards none, with charity for all," the 

16 



great-souled President, full of gentleness and goodness, en- 
shrining in his God-touched heart "the greatness of real 
goodness, and the goodness of real greatness," the man who 
could say, "I never knowingly planted a thorn in any human 
heart," the man whose unfathomable depths of sympathy 
made him the great burden bearer of his people, the Ameri- 
can man of sorrows, the man who walked through the 
streets of Richmond, the captured capital of the foe, not 
jubilant and vain-glorious with the sense of Northern vic- 
tory, but with a bleeding heart suffering with the sufferings 
of the South; the man who could say, "I have not suffered 
for the South, I have suffered with the South" ; that man 
now turned his wide open arms and heart to welcome the 
South back to the old home like a brother beloved, and 
stooped to cheer and caress and lift the suffering and sor- 
rowing brother as he sat wrapped in tattered and blood-be- 
spatter ed gray, disconsolate amid the smoldering ashes of his 
homes and hopes, and out of those ashes, into which, wound- 
ed to death, it had been flung, the expiring serpent of human 
slavery darted its poisoned fangs, and in the writhing of its 
death agonies, it wounded and slew the gentlest, kindest, 
noblest, greatest and sublimest leader and lover the Ameri- 
can people ever had. 

It was not the South, O! lay it not to the charge of the 
American citizen soldiers who fought in gray, lay it not over 
against the door of the chivalry of Virginia or the knight- 
hood of her confederate states, lay not that monstrous sin 
on the heart of the people ; that was not the deed of defeated 

17 



patriotism; it was the culminating crime of expiring tyranny; 
it was not the spirit of the South, it was the spirit of slavery 
that slew the noble Lincoln; it was the feudal spirit of the 
Middle Ages, expiring on the free soil of this blood-bought 
Republic, which in its dying hour gathered and spent its 
last breath in one climactic act of vengeance against the man 
who was the embodiment of the free spirit of the coming 
ages and whom high heaven had commissioned to banish 
slavery from this land of freedom. 

It was on the night of the 14th of April, 1865, that the 
passion-possessed and deluded Booth sent the fatal bullet 
crashing on its terrible mission of death and disaster, and 
though the light of the morning of another day dawned over 
the stricken nation before his departure, he for whom the 
many millions mourned never saw it, for without regaining 
consciousness here he opened his eyes there in the beauteous 
land of eternal light and everlasting peace at twenty-two 
minutes past seven on the morning of the fifteenth. 

Ah! and who shall say that, with all its horror and its 
mystery, in some slight degree akin to that of Calvary, his 
death was not the fitting crown of his life! Two hundred 
thousand heroes, in answer to his call, had laid down their 
lives to defend that flag and purge it of its stain, and when 
safe and secure, free and pure, it was at last unfurled over 
a re-united country, and the great task was done, he bowed 
and lay himself down beside the humblest of the boys in 
blue, crowning his four years of living martyrdom with the 
sacrifice of his life on the altar of his country. 

18 



Eclipsing the joy of returning peace, this fateful cloud 
cast a dark shadow over the whole land. The nation was 
bathed in tears, and draped in mourning, while the grief of 
the emancipated slaves was sublimely pathetic, and through- 
out the world the note of sympathy and sorrow found full- 
ness of expression. The great President was shot. Abra- 
ham Lincoln was dead. 

Paying our homage to his memory, let us not deify the 
man and rob him of his humanity, for Lincoln was not only 
very much a man, but very, very human, and it is the very hu- 
manness of the man that is the basis of the eternal glory of 
the man. It is as a man, a man of the people, a man of the 
common people, that the memory of his name, and the fame 
of his life, and the influence of his words and works come to 
us as one of the richest legacies of our national past. But 
none the less, like Moses, the Hebrew, and Paul, the Jew, 
and Columbus, the Genoese, and Luther, the German, and 
Cromwell, the Briton, and Washington, the first American, 
Abraham Lincoln was God's man for a chosen task, the 
only man of the century who could have stood, like a mod- 
ern Atlas, supporting the columns of the Union, not on his 
shoulders, but on his heart. 

Aside from the saving of the Union, the supreme achieve- 
ment of President Lincoln, and what he himself called "the 
great event of the Nineteenth Century," was the emancipa- 
tion of the American negro. For years he had felt the in- 
justice and inconsistency of human slavery in a republic 
founded on human freedom, and had long prophecied that it 

19 



was doomed to die. As early as 1 838 in the Legislature of 
Illinois he had gone on record as its implacable foe, and it 
was his attitude toward slavery that made him President. 
But he was not a radical; he was constitutionally conserva- 
tive. He recognized that under the Constitution slavery had 
certain legal rights, and he condemned the inflammatory 
methods of the Abolitionists. He would have much pre- 
ferred a gradual and compensated emancipation, as was 
actually wrought out under his leadership in the District of 
Columbia in 1 862, and as England had done some years 
before throughout her vast colonial empire, but it was not 
to be ; the sword had been lifted by the hand of slavery, and 
it was the sword that was to fall back into the heart of 
slavery. 

Convinced of its wisdom and necessity by the vicissitudes 
of the war and the checkered fortunes of the Union, he 
issued his Proclamation of Emancipation on the first of 
January, 1 863, adding a worthy companion to the other two 
superlative American documents, the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the Constitution of the United States, and 
from that day no man of whatsoever race or color has ever 
breathed the breath of a slave beneath the ample folds of 
the American flag, and Abraham Lincoln has taken his 
place among the sons of men as the Great Emancipator. 

He is not only the Great American, but the great man of 
the Nineteenth Century; he is not only a national figure, but 
a world hero, a masterpiece of humanity; and not only has 
his own proud people haloed him in glory, but all races of 

20 



free men unite to do him honor and accord him a conspicu- 
ous place among the immortals. 

And while art has built its monuments and painted its 
canvasses, and literature has woven its crown of immortelles 
to enshrine him for our own and future times, and while to- 
day countless hearts echo the prayer of the negro, "God 
Bless Marse Linkum," we may not forget that the challenge 
of his memory is to something higher and nobler than the 
carving of stone, the mixing of colors, the making of fine 
sentences, or even the offering of pious petitions; it is a 
challenge to the loftiest patriotism and the noblest brother- 
hood, a love of God and Country, and a love of fellow- 
man that shall rise over and above the littleness of selfish- 
ness, and pour out on the altar of God and Country and our 
common Humanity the divinest libation of our hearts and 
lives. 

As in his immortal speech on the battlefield of Gettys- 
burg, he called, so in his hallowed memory to-day he calls, 
that we, the living, shall dedicate and consecrate ourselves 
to the yet unfinished tasks remaining before us, highly re- 
solving that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth 
of freedom, and that government of the people, by the 
people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 
That is the meaning and the challenge of Abraham Lincoln 
to the manhood, the patriotism of our day and generation, 
and well may we pray — 

"Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, 
Lest we forget — lest we forget" — 

21 ' *-' 



and sing with devout spirits and patriotic hearts around the 
altar of our God, and the shrine of our country: 

"Our fathers' God, to Thee, 
Author of Liberty, 

To Thee we sing; 
Long may our land be bright 
With freedom's holy light; 
Protect us by Thy might, 

Great God, our King. 




22 



IB S'l2 



